MUSIC REVIEW

MUSIC REVIEW; Pouring Great Old Wine Into Some Very Old Skins

By ANNE MIDGETTE

Published: April 17, 2004

Attempts to make classical music sound new often smack of forced over-interpretation. Roger Norrington's goal is to make classical music sound old. An advocate of the idea of playing music on period instruments -- which has done much to redefine contemporary understanding of what Baroque music sounded like -- at the start of his conducting career he took it one step further, by using original instruments in the music of later classical composers: Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn. Technically speaking, therefore, the music doesn't sound new. But it certainly sounds different.

So did the Orchestra of St. Luke's under Sir Roger, its music director from 1990 to 1994, in a sparkling and under-attended all-Schubert program at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night. St. Luke's is not, of course, an original-instruments ensemble, but it was striking what a difference Sir Roger achieved by applying a few basic precepts -- well, one basic precept, playing without vibrato.

This familiar effect, a gentle throbbing from the strings, is standard today, but Sir Roger maintains that it wasn't prevalent until the 20th century, and tries to get rid of it. The result, on Thursday, was like stripping off a layer of thick varnish: the instruments were brash, less blended, a little awkward, exuberant and full of energy, bracing as waves crashing on a shoreline (Sir Roger had fun with abrupt loudness.) You could say it sounded younger, even adolescent; and you could say that in this it fit the music of Schubert, who wrote most of it in his 20's.

Having established his approach in the ''Rosamunde'' overture, Sir Roger immediately, if tacitly, raised the question of later generations' reinterpretations of classical music by conducting six Schubert songs in orchestrations by Brahms, Webern, Reger and Britten.

The most ''period'' element here was the Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, whose intimate and direct singing seems the kind of thing you might have heard in a 19th-century drawing room: communicative, straightforward, delicately nuanced. In fact, he sometimes seemed almost too delicate for the orchestrations, which tugged the ear in all different directions with their own unfamiliar interpretations of this music. Britten's clarinets in ''Die Forelle,'' for example, flashed repeatedly across the scene like sunlight on water, distracting from the trout's death-throes in the text.

At the end of the set, Sir Roger repeated one song, Brahms's orchestration of ''Geheimes,'' which seemed much pithier and more pungent the second time around: the repeated violin figures less smeary, the vocal line cleaner and more expressive. One would not have objected to a repeat of the whole set. The final piece was Schubert's Ninth symphony, the ''Great,'' which did sound great in this energetic reading.